Tyrannical Minds, Dean A. Haycock, PhD
Tyrannical Minds, Dean A. Haycock, PhD
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Tyrannical Minds
Psychological Profiling, Narcissism, and Dictatorship

Author: Dean A. Haycock, PhD

Narrator: Paul Brion

Unabridged: 9 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/31/2021


Synopsis

Not everyone can become a tyrant. It requires a particular confluence of events to gain absolute control over entire nations.

First, you must be born with the potential to develop brutal personality traits. Second, your predisposition to antisocial behavior must be developed and strengthened during childhood. Finally, you must come of age when the political system of your country is unstable. Together, these events establish a basis for a rise to power, one that Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi all used to gain life-and-death control over their countrymen and women.

"Getting inside the heads" of foreign leaders and terrorists is one way governments try to understand, predict, and influence their actions. Psychological profiles can help us understand the urges of tyrants to dominate, subjugate, torture and slaughter.

Tyrannical Minds reveals how recognizing their psychological traits can provide insight into the motivations and actions of dangerous leaders, potentially allow to us predict their behavior—and even how to stop them.

Contains mature themes.

About Dean A. Haycock, PhD

Dean A. Haycock, PHD, is a science and medical writer living in New York. His books include Murderous Minds: Exploring the Criminal Psychopathic Brain: Neurological Imaging and the Manifestation of Evil, Characters on the Couch: Exploring Psychology Through Literature and Film; The Everything Health Guide to Adult Bipolar Disorder, Second and Third Editions, and The Everything Health Guide to Schizophrenia.

He earned a PhD in neurobiology from Brown University and a fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health to study at The Rockefeller University. The results of his research, conducted in academia and in the pharmaceutical industry, have been published in Brain Research, the Journal of Neurochemistry, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, and the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, among others.

His feature articles have appeared in many newspapers, magazines, and other outlets, including the Huffington Post, Salon, WebMD, Annals of Internal Medicine, the Lancet Neurology, Drug Discovery and Development, BioWorld Today, BioWorld International, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and Current Biology. In addition, he has contributed articles on a variety of topics to The Gale Encyclopedia of Science and The Gale Encyclopedia of Mental Health.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Will on April 15, 2025

People shy away from parallels to fascism, but it’s important to note that fascism is not a political ideology or strategy but mental pathology of societal scale, starting with an impaired individual manipulating psychological weaknesses in the population to achieve power, and then multiplying th......more

Goodreads review by Mariah on April 25, 2024

3.5 stars. Lots of interesting and thoughtful points made in this. The premise for the book is that throughout more recent history there have been more than a handful of dictators that exhibit obvious signs of personality disorders, specifically narcissistic personality disorder, as well as other me......more

Goodreads review by Brian on September 23, 2023

I enjoyed this book. It helped to better understand the context in which twentieth century despots came to power and their underlying pathology. Though exact traits cannot be pointed to as cause, the book did provide a framework of relevant traits that contribute to bad behavior @ in the authoritari......more

Goodreads review by Charles on July 25, 2022

This book got almost immediately outdated by the Jan 6 insurrection. Hearing the narrator describe Trump as not actually a despot but just somebody with authoritarian tendencies made me laugh and cry. That's not an issue you can hold against the author, tho. What I can hold against the author is the......more

Goodreads review by Agnė on January 04, 2021

Man trūko struktūros. Pačioje knygoje nėra vienos temos, kuri būtų išnagrinėta. Regis turėtų būti apie diktatorius, bet 40% knygos skirta Trump'ui. Nėra iki galo aprašyta diktatorių psichologinio profilio sudarymo metodologija, problematika. Skyriai ir potemės chaotiški. Nors tikrai yra įdomių faktų......more